E. Antonelli - The Child of Fortune. Envy and the Constitution of the Social Space, seconde bozze

The Child of FortuneEnvy and the Constitution of the Social Space

EmanueleAntonelliUniversita di Torino, Italy

In this paper, we will sketch out a simple scheme to evaluate different ways inwhich Western society has coped with the momentous and hidden problem ofenvy; afterward, we will consider the consequences for the constitution of thesocial space that these changes entail. We will argue that envy, when consideredas a primal feeling, can shed light on René Girard’s notion of metaphysical desireand on diasparagmos rituals. Then, taking into account Jean-Pierre Dupuy’sendogenous fixed point thesis—concerning the constitution of autotranscendentsocial structures that configure themselves around an attractor, a fixed point,revealed to be a product of the process of constitution, an effect and not acause—we will consider envy as the main feedback in the system. Starting fromthis theoretical scenario, we will envisage three steps—on a line sketchedaccording to mimetic theory—marked by the particular conditions and role ofthe feedback. We will show what kind of balance was guaranteed to Athens(taken as an exemplar archaic society, starting from its self-representation asgiven by Sophocles in Oedipus the King) by the complementary rituals ofpharmakos and ostrakos; what equilibrium was offered to Christian medievalsocial structures by the doctrine of the deadly sins; and, finally, we will take a lookat our own secularized society. Our aim is to apply René Girard’s theory

Contagion: Journal of Violence, Mimesis, and Culture, Vol. 20, No. 1, 2013, pp. 117–140. ISSN 1075-7201.© 2013Michigan State University Board of Trustees. All rights reserved. 117

This work originally appeared in Contagion, 20, Spring 2013, published by Michigan State University Press.

systematically, to show how the philosophy of history that we can infer from hisworks can help us to detect a curious and at the same time quite dramatic changeas far as the homeostatic equilibrium of our society is concerned. Thanks to thisexercise, we will be able to show how the transcendental social space—by whichwe mean the region of possible outcomes, in terms of constraints andpossibilities, of a human life in a social context—is constituted through thevictimage mechanism as defined by Girard and how this constitution is affectedby the performative unveiling of the mechanism itself.

“Oedipus is the child of Fortune, the man of spectacular highs and lows.”

—René Girard,Oedipus Unbound.1

Following up on a footnote in Violence and the Sacred,2 where Girardtakes into account Jean-Pierre Vernant’s famous study of Oedipus theKing,3 we will argue that in Girard’s own formulation, mimetic theory

misses a chance to extend its scope. In his reading of Vernant’s paper,Girard only refers to the interpretation of Oedipus’s mythical crimes interms of the loss of differences, but he does not focus on the hypothesis ofthe symmetrical relation between the rites of pharmakos and the procedureof ostracism. Focusing on the violent victimage resolution, he doesn’t seemto notice that the violent killing—being just one of its possibleepiphenomena—embodies a logic of discrimination that determines theboundaries, that is to say the constraints and the possibilities, of thecommunity. Vernant’s interpretation of the specular rituals of ostrakos andpharmakos is open to be recast through Dupuy’s formalization of thevictimage mechanism: the victim of the lynching, the common antagonist,occupies at the bottom the place that the ostracized occupies at the top.Both are endogenous fixed points; that is to say, both are individuated by themechanism of the mimetic convergence: the one that the community hatesand the one that it envies. So, if the victimage mechanism offers the city itsdifferential structure, through this double mechanism the polis also finds itslimits. This can help us define other issues raised by the same logic anddescribe in a quite precise way a specific set of consequences of theChristian unveiling of the victimage mechanism for the structure and thelimits of the social space.

To approach the core question of our hypothesis, let us go back to thefirst book in which Girard unveils the mimetic mediations of desire to

118 Emanuele Antonelli


explain the preponderance of envy in modern society. In Deceit, Desire, andthe Novel,4 Girard argues that desire is fundamentally triangular, that onenever desires an object for its intrinsic values but because somebody else, thatGirard names mediator, or model, desires it. Thus, Girard unveils a triangularstructure behind every desire, subject-mediator-object. According to Girard’sreading of a number of novels chosen out of the Western literature canon,such as Don Quijote, Le Rouge et le Noir, Dostoevsky’s classics, and Proust’sÀ la recherche du temps perdu, there are two fundamental kinds of triangularmediation: when the mediator is out of reach for the subject, Girard definesthe relationship as external mediation. This is the case for Don Quijote andAmadis of Gaul: even if they are both fictitious, Amadis is a character insidethe fiction who Don Quijote reads about. When the mediator and thesubject live, so to say, in the same world, Girard defines the relationship asinternal mediation. Such is the case of Monsieur de Rênal and MonsieurValenod in Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le Noir. According to Deceit, Desire, andthe Novel, it is possible to outline an historical relationship between the twokinds of mediation, showing that internal mediation, especially indemocratic societies, is taking the lead.

Following up on this intuition, Girard observes that envy is characteristicof internal mediation. Indeed, Girard holds that “jealousy and envy, likehatred, are scarcely more than traditional names given to internalmediation.”5 What follows, a few lines after, is to be underlined; Girard,giving an account of Stendhal’s Les mémoires d’un touriste, writes:

Stendhal warns his readers against what he calls the modern emotions, fruits ofuniversal vanity: “envy, jealousy, and impotent hatred.” Stendhal’s formula gatherstogether the three triangular emotions: it envisages them apart from any particularobject; it associates them with that imperative need to imitate by which, accordingto the novelist, the nineteenth century is completely possessed.6

Here, Girard, at the outset of the amazing path he has taken, is envisagingmodernity as the result of the falling apart of all structures of externalmediation. The logical sequence that he has drawn, to explain the evolutionof desire in modern novels, clearly shows the progressive reduction of thedistance between the subject and his mediator. What Girard does notenvisage, yet, is that this distance is itself already a product of history; aproduct that we can assume is to be considered not yet present in the scenedescribed in his later works. Therefore, what Girard, using the words ofStendhal, describes asmodern emotions are likely tobe at least very similar to thoseexperienced by human beings in primeval crises of undifferentiation or in the

The Child of Fortune 119


very simple and not yet sufficiently differentiated societies coming out ofsacrificial resolutions. Taking inspiration from Jean-Pierre Dupuy’s works onthe endogenous fixed point—to which we will return later—could we define asecondary and slightly different scene for the victimage resolutions? Girard’saccount of them usually starts from a fight, sprung out of nothingmore thanmimetic mediation itself, followed by an undifferentiated violence of allagainst all, that finally leads the members of the community to concentrateand transfer their own violence on an arbitrary selected victim. We wouldlike to envisage the possibility to see the scapegoat mechanism as the resultnot only, or not always, of the convergence of violence but also of theconvergence of envious attentions.

The victimage mechanism as Girard has presented it mostly emergesfrom crises themselves produced by the escalation to extremes of violentacts. Without making any objections to the principal model, we are claimingthat once we accept that human relationships are fundamentally groundedinmimesis, we can see through a different hermeneutic lens events like thosetraditionally called ��ó� (sparagmoi), the kind of ritual killing andspontaneous lynching that Dionysus encountered. As Girard writes, envy,jealousy, and impotent hatred can be considered apart from any particularobject; we could consider envy to be a traditional name to designate thereaction to so-called metaphysical desire, which does not need any object toexplode. Metaphysical desire is basically the desire for the mediator’s being,so it is easy to consider it to be the most primitive mode of desire. We canimagine the explosion of metaphysical desires in the simplest possiblecommunity, without any need for objects. We just need to have onemember of the community enjoying a position of leadership, somethingthat barely distinguishes human societies from animal groups. If we acceptthis imaginary scenario, we should not find any difficulty in making asmaterial, as concrete as possible this impulse to grasp the mediator’s being.There we have the sparagmos, the tearing apart of the victim’s being.7 Let ustake a step backward to make this hypothesis more consistent and clear.

Dupuy has shown, starting from Le signe et l’envie8 to the recentlyrepublished Libéralisme et justice sociale,9 that envy is a “form ofinterpersonal relation, a relation with other people, not objects.”10

Potentially, envy is therefore something that could spread without anyobject, even though, as George Foster stated, “possession is the trigger.”11

Dupuy also tells us that one of the most common mimetic rivalries is theone produced by the quest for prestige or kudos or mana. This is somethingthat human beings have been fighting for ever since, something that Homer



tells us about and that mimetic theory can finally explain.12 What we wouldlike to do is to connect this kind of antagonistic relationship to an analysis ofleadership. In the recently published Dans l’œil du cyclone13 and La marquedu sacré,14 Dupuy produces a clear account of the logic behind charismaticleadership, going further beyond Freud’s naïveté:

Let us consider the keystone of the crowd according to Freud: its chief, its leader. Ina crowd, the contagion of beliefs, feelings, and actions is extreme, eachmember of itresonating, so to speak, with everyone else. Such a situation is the case because,explains the father of psychoanalysis, everyone has overcome his self-love, his “nar-cissism,” and has replaced it with a love object (amour d’objet): now, it happens thatthe common goal, the one that everyone else loves, is the person of the chief. Such isthe libidinal link that gives the crowd its cohesion, but also its irrational tendencies.The leader himself is the chief because he is the only one who kept his narcis-sism . . . . What keeps the crowd united is a fixed point that does not belong to it,since it has a property (self-love) no one else has, or rather no longer has.15

Dupuy’s intent is to show how Freud fails in explaining this kind of socialphenomena. Freud locates at the center of the crowd a singularity, the oneand only man to have conserved his own narcissism.16 Dupuy defines thissingularity, or “fixed point,” as exogenous to make clear that in Freud’saccount, the leader of the crowd has a logical anteriority with respect to thesocial system that is created around it. What Dupuy maintains instead, inthe wake of mimetic theory analysis of the coquette effect, is that the chief,the leader, is just as mimetically driven as the other members of the crowd,and the object of his fascination, indicated by all the other mediators in thesame crowd, is himself.

With this argument, Dupuy provides a theory of social self-transcendence, based on mimetic theory, that we will be able to apply to ourown hypothesis. The mimetic drives of human beings are likely to produce,in specific conditions such as the crowd, these system effects. As thequotation from Dupuy states, in a crowd, the contagion of beliefs, offeelings, and of gestures is extreme. What is being described is a powerfuland dangerous situation of internal mediation in which the crowd creates,all by itself, something that looks like an external mediation. With Dupuy,we can provide a slightly different resolution of the undifferentiation crisis.If it starts in violence, it will easily end up in a victimage resolution; if it isjust about mutual fascination, it can produce a leader before producing avictim.



Here we have the social, mimetic production of an endogenousleadership, perceived as exogenous; this perception gives to the leader aposition of external mediation, well-attested by Freud’s account that naïvelygives credence to the singularity and therefore to the transcendent orexternal origin of the leader. Girard usually focuses his attention on the risksof this kind of convergence, seeing in double mediation—that is to say,when two individuals are imitating each other’s desires, being at the sametime subject and mediator of two entangled triangles—the very core andsource of mimetic rivalries and potential victimage resolutions. What wesee, instead, is the creation, the transcendental constitution, of new modelsof mediation.

Just as the victimage resolution does not only solve a specific crisis butalso will establish the model for the rituals to come, the projection of theleader does not only represent the effect of a specific social effervescencebut also creates the idea of leadership and, every time it is renewed, will alsoredefine the features of this model, adding new attributes andrequirements—a result of the unreasonable boosting entailed by themimetic projection—for everyone else to be called the leader,17 and, goingon down the social ladder, citizen, virtuous, rich, poor, and so on.

Summing up, this situation has two outcomes. In little-differentiatedsystems, coming soon after the peaceful resolution, it could easily end upprovoking envy in other members of the community: once emancipatedfrom the contagion of the crowd, they would experience a deepmetaphysical desire toward the leader and be infected once again, this timespecifically by envy. A convergence of envious attentions, expressed insufficiently rude and concrete attempts to grasp the leader’s being, wouldthen produce a new victimary and cathartic resolution.

In general, as we have been suggesting, because of the very same mimeticconstitution of human desires, these projections, whenever recorded inindividual memory or in written traces, will define the structure of the socialspace.

NEGATIVE FEEDBACK

As an exemplary case of the kind of archaic societies that according toGirard labor under the spell of the victimage mechanism, we would like toconsider the case of Oedipus as described in an outstanding paper by Jean-Pierre Vernant, which, although clearly vulnerable to a Girardian critique,18

provides us some good insights on our theme. “Ambiguity and Reversal. On



the Enigmatic Structure of Oedipus Rex” is a wonderful example of whatGirard would call a blind revealing: Vernant—perhaps the greatest of thecontemporary French classicists and Hellenists—organizes a great amountof data that perfectly fit with a mimetic reading of Oedipus the King withoutcasting the slightest doubt on Oedipus’s guilt.

Vernant provides an analysis, inspired by W. B. Stanford’s Ambiguity inGreek Literature,19 of Sophocles’s language, which in this tragedy is—like noother topos in Greek literature—filled with enantiosemies and amphibologies. Eventhoughhe refers toOedipus’s crimes as “an attack on the fundamental rules” ofwhich he says “by making himself guilty of them, Oedipus has shuffled thecards, mixed up positions and pawns,”20 Vernant does not understand or atleast does not really appreciate Stanford’s insight, perhaps because he isabsolutely convinced of Oedipus’s guilt. Through semantics alone, we arebeing given an account of the undifferentiation crisis in which Thebes isdrowning. Nevertheless, in this paper, Vernant provides an accurate re-flection on Athens’s strategy to keep the social balance.21 His consider-ations are driven by an interpretation of Sophocles’s ambiguity based onthe idea that just as the language shows, Oedipus, as a symbol of mankind,is condemned to find, at his own risk, the threshold between the god andthe beast, between the judge and the guilty, between the king and thepharmakos, or scapegoat; and so is the polis. It is important to see whatkind of blind revealing Vernant performs in his text; for this reason, andbecause he is nevertheless one of the leading figures in the field, we willcite his text extensively.

The ambiguity of his words translates not the duplicity of his character,which is all of a piece, but more profoundly the duality of his being. Oedipusis double.

It is the gods who send back to Oedipus, as an echo to certain of his words, his owndiscourse, deformed or turned around. And this echo, which sounds like a sinisterburst of laughter, is in reality a rectification.What Oedipus says without wishing to,without understanding it, constitutes the only authentic truth of his words. Thedouble dimension of Oedipus’ language reproduces, then, in an inverted form, thedouble dimensionof the languageof the gods as it is expressed in the enigmatic formof the oracle. The gods know and speak the truth, but theymake it known by givingit expression in words which seem to men to say something quite different. Thelanguage ofOedipus thus appears as the placewhere two different discoursesweavethemselves and confront each other in the same language: a human discourse, adivine discourse.22



Vernant is showing and describing much more than he is actually declaring.Leaving aside the Girardian critique we could make against this essay,especially as far as the faith in the Greek gods’ honesty23 is concerned, wewould like to concentrate on the few elements Vernant offers aboutostracism. He introduces this theme going back to Bernard Knox’s Oedipusat Thebes. Sophocles’ Tragic Hero and His Time,24 in which all thecharacteristic inversions of the play are shown. Vernant tells us that:

A first form of reversal consists in using, to characterize the status of Oedipus, avocabulary the values of which are systematically invertedwhen they pass from activeto passive.... He is the doctor using a medicinal vocabulary to speak of the evil fromwhich the city is suffering, but he is also the sickman(61, 674) and the sickness (1293,1387–88, 1396).25

Vernant gives us all the tools to understand what is actually going on. Usinginversions of diathesis—in this light, it is interesting and revealing that theGreek verb that means “to imitate,” ��o��ı (miméomai), is a middlevoice, in which we see a quite clear awareness of the priority of imitation onthe individual: it is not me imitating somebody else, but imitation creatingand defining both (in the case of a double mediation) me and mymediator—Sophocles is giving us a chance to understand that theinversions the tragedy is about are happening to Oedipus. But let uscontinue:

Another form of reversal is the following: the terms which designateOedipus at theheight of his glory detach themselves from him one by one to come to rest on thegods; the grandeur ofOedipus vanishes in proportion as, in contrast with his, that ofthe gods is affirmed.26

Finally Vernant, following line-by-line the mythical trial, confirms oursuspicions about his own complicity with Oedipus’s scapegoating: “It is amatter then of discovering the criminal who is the stain of the city, its agos,to get rid of the evil through him.”27 Here is our core question. Vernantexplains where the pharmakos rite comes from, recalling the old legend ofthe impure killing of Androgeos of Crete28: one version of the legend saysthat Androgeos was killed by some young Athenians during the Olympicgames because of his manifest athletic supremacy. It is clear, therefore, that, atits origin, the pharmakos was very much closer to ostracism. Thus, onceVernant has told us how the pharmakos rite began and what it produced—“the rite of the pharmakos realizes the expulsion of human disorder; . . . it is



anomia which is averted”29—he can then provide the consideration thatinspired Derrida’s essay “Plato’s Pharmacy”: “The symmetry of thepharmakos and the legendary king, the first assuming a role below analogousto that which the second plays on high, perhaps casts light on the institutionof ostracism”30 and that we can now easily reframe as the description of twospecular epiphenomena of the same logic.

So, what is ostracism? It was a procedure in which a citizen could beexpelled from the polis for five or ten years. Even if in some cases it was aclear expression of popular anger at the victim, ostracism was usedpreemptively, to defuse major confrontations between rival politicians, or toeliminate those who were considered a potential threat to the state, or apotential tyrant. Ostracism had no relation to the processes of justice: therewas no charge or defense, no trial at all.31

As we have seen, aside from political and civil reasons—such as to avoidany risk of tyranny—ostracism is structured so as to “express popular angerat the victim” or to “give to popular feeling, that Greek named phtonos (atonce envy and religious suspicion), the chance to manifest itself in the mostspontaneous and most unanimous form.”32 The absence of rationality33 andlawfulness of the procedure are pointed out by all scholars, starting fromVernant himself. Let us return once again to Vernant’s text:

When it [the polis] establishes ostracism, it creates an institution whose role issymmetrical to and the inverse of the ritual [of the pharmakos]. In the person of theostracized, the city expels what in it is too elevated, what incarnates the evil that cancome to it from above. In the evil of the pharmakos, it expels what is vilest in itself,what incarnates the evil thatmenaces it frombelow.By this double and complemen-tary rejection it delimits itself in relation to what is not yet known and what tran-scends the known: it takes the proper measure of the human in opposition on oneside to the divine and heroic, on the other to the bestial and monstrous.34

As we saw before, if we split up the two sides of the coin, leave apart theviolent origin and the convergence of envy and we understand that allperceived exogenous points are actually produced35 by mimeticconvergences as endogenous fixed points, we can finally have a new insight.If we understand that leadership (and the same goes, finally, for the divinekingship or tyranny itself), just like the scapegoating, is a product ofmimetic convergence, we can see how balance and equilibrium could bemaintained in a society like that of Athens. If we understand how mimeticconvergences give to endogenous fixed points a real power of leadership, wealso can disagree with Vernant’s statement: “For what is the ostracized



reproached but for those same superiorities which raise him above thecommon and for his fortune, too great?”36 I think that we now can avoidfalling into Vernant’s naïveté and understand that the perceived superioritiesof the ostracized are as much a product of the crowd as the ostracism itself.We can appreciate how the Athenian system works: in a sine wave, mimeticconvergences give to endogenous fixed points a leadership, a position ofsuperiority that then provokes, in the leader’s peers, a growing feeling of envythat, when—and if—it reaches the critical mass, will not explode in aritualized and violent scapegoating—the pharmakos, through which thesociety will be purified of all the envious tensions—alongside which anotherritual expulsion—a sort of virtual stoning—ostracism, will actually eliminatethe cause of envious comparison. We very much wish to emphasize that inthis system, the structure works in such a way that envy plays the role of anegative feedback.37 Once the mimetic convergence lets a leader emerge andrise too high above his peers, it will strike again and take him down, re-establishing not only order but equilibrium, both in the here and now of thespecific resolution and in the transcendental realm, establishing thecontours—again the constraints and the possibilities—of the leaders tocome.38 As we know, scapegoating is considered by Girard to be a self-regulating mechanism to contain violence. What we are sketching out hereis much closer to the originary scene in Freud’s Totem and Taboo, althoughcompletely stripped of Freud’s naïveties as exposed by Girard and Dupuy.The structural homeostasis is safeguarded through the real expulsion ofsomebody who provokes envy and resentment, somebody who hassomething to mediate desires with, even though he is not intrinsicallydifferent, or singular, as Freud would have said.39

Now, as far as the constitution of the social space is concerned, wewould like to introduce an image whose role is to give a geometricalvisualization of our theme: one can think of the victimage mechanism—andmimetic theory itself—as a spiral converging on the victim, the fixed point,the origin, and end of the spiral itself. Doubling the process of projection ofendogenous fixed points—the pharmakos and the ostrakos, from below andfrom above—we can imagine two spirals turning their backs on each other,giving as a result a sort of (double) bell curve. The two spirals define thethreshold of the social space, that is to say, a normal distribution of possibleoutcomes of a human life. As Vernant says,40 the polis—la cité—demarcates its borders by cutting, through ostracism and scapegoating, thetails of the curve.



The social space, the region of possibility of social and human life is inthis way delimited, no one can rise over or fall under those limits, and thosewho do will be ostracized or victimized. This process that we called theconstitution of transcendental social space is to be interpreted in a veryconcrete way. Through numerous tools that all belong and refer tomemory,41 the mimetic individual finds new models and examples toorientate his own desire. Let us put it this way: letting one enjoy theprojection of the mimetic convergence will define through memory, traces,files, and written testimonies new standards of achievement as far as virtues,power or wealth can be concerned. The same goes for the lower border ofthe polis. Disposing of the beast, of the monster, as pharmakoi, the polis willdefine the lower border of misery, ugliness, and cowardice under whichnobody can allow himself—nor those with whom he maintains bonds ofsolidarity—to go. The polis, through two specular mimetic convergences—two spirals—defines (or finds itself in a defined) region of possibleoutcomes in which we can clearly identify a political or social instance ofAristotle’s golden mean.

It is important to note that the distance between the monster and thehero, between the god and the beast, is not enough to define an externalmediation; the transcendental constitution42 mediated by traces andmemory does so. The leader enjoying the mimetic boosting is not in himselftranscendent, nor a fortiori transcendental, but once constituted the regionof possibility of leadership—or whatever other region—that will provide anexternal mediation, for example, we will have tales and witnesses of theleader’s achievements, monuments recalling his virtues, and so on.

THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS

According to our intent, we have now to make a jump to understand how anideal Christian society—sketched following Girard’s hypothesis—canachieve equilibrium in the face of envy, and delimitation. Envy is one of theseven deadly sins; something that is a little less common knowledge is thatenvy entered the group of the seven only in the sixth century. From aGirardian point of view43 we should be aware that in the Decalogue, thecommandments: “You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall notcovet your neighbor’s wife, or male or female slave, or ox, or donkey, oranything that belongs to your neighbor,” clearly refers to mimetic desires. Infact, the specificity of envy, especially in the mimetic paradigm, is not at allthe desire for other people’s things, which is plainly mimetic, but



resentment and the wish to deprive others more than to obtain the covetedthing for oneself. Therefore, even though it is clearly connected, especiallyfrom a genetic perspective, we may consider envy to be a distinct problem,arising in a specific, slightly different social homeostasis.

We know that envy, under the name of phtonos, has been well-knownand well-defined at least since Aristotle, who treats it in the NicomacheanEthics as the pain caused by the good fortune of others: “the enviousman . . . is annoyed at all success of others.”44 As we noted, envy was notone of the seven deadly sins until 590 CE, and this is something that wewould like to elaborate upon: one thing that we should immediately noticeis that in one of the oldest texts we could subsume in this sequence, theBook of Proverbs, it is said that “six things the Lord hateth, and the seventhHis soul detesteth,” the only sin that remained in the traditional list is pride.We owe the modern conceptual framework of the Deadly Sins to the fourthcentury monk Evagrius Ponticus,45 who listed eight evil behaviors, in whichenvy does not appear yet, but pride does twice, thanks to a slightdifferentiation: pride and vainglory.

Then, in 590 AD, Pope Gregory I added envy and folded vainglory intopride.46 As far as our problem is concerned, we would then argue that, afterthe loss of tools like those used by archaic and pagan societies, such asostracism, a fragile and weak but nonetheless coherent social structure wasput in place to create a new balance.

The inversion of the semantics and of the structure is quite amazing inits precision. Over the centuries pride is the only evil thought, or sin, thathas remained unchanged. If we look at the standard meanings of the twosins we are getting closer to, pride and vainglory, we will see that vaingloryas unjustified boasting became, as a result of these semantic changes, ararely used word in itself, and is now commonly interpreted as referring tovanity (in its modern narcissistic sense);47 pride “is identified as a desire tobe more important or attractive than others, failing to acknowledge the goodwork of others, and excessive love of self.”48 I would like to add also anotherinteresting consideration on the etymology of pride (and its relatives): thelate Old English prud, prute,49 probably had only the sense “brave, gallant,magnificent, stately.”50 If we check other Romanic languages, such as Italianor French, whose word for pride is orgoglio, orgueil, we find that it probablyderives from the late Old German, *URGÔLI or *ORGUOLÎ “remarkable,renowned, majestic, sumptuous.”51 We may also cite the Latin superbia ofwhich it is said that it is not clear how to identify the end: -bus (supèr-bus); itcould be either BIOS, from Greek bia (force), or BHÛ, the Sanskrit root of



to be. So, as far as pride is concerned, we can notice two important things: atleast in the case of Western languages, we could easily ask the questionVernant was asking for those who are ostracized: “For what is the ostracizedreproached but for those same superiorities which raise him above thecommon and for his fortune, too great?” I would argue that in both cases,for pride and vainglory, we don’t blame proud and vainglorious ones fortheir superiorities or virtues, but for their “failing to acknowledge the goodwork of others.” If pride is still tightly connected to hybris and in many waysis about rising above one’s peers, vainglory refers more explicitly to showingoff, attributing to oneself all the credit that should be shared with the wholecommunity. A vainglorious person is somebody who does not understandor give credit for the contribution of others to his own success; vaingloryactually means not being aware of the mimetic convergence around oneself.

We could then argue that the addition of envy late in the fourth centuryis in itself quite interesting, especially if we take account of the commonsense opinion on envy, the only sin that does not produce any pleasure noradvantage for the sinner, “one of the most potent causes of unhappiness.”52

As we were suggesting before, Western Christian medieval society hadprovided a coherent, even though much more fragile, structure to maintaina balance.

If, following Girard, we give credit to the performativity of Christianityas far as the revealing and, therefore, the breaking of the victimagemechanism is concerned, if we give credit to the idea that Biblical textstaught people to condemn crowd scapegoating, where society is left withoutany tool to re-establish and maintain social borders, to purify itself from themimetic drives in the perspective we are assuming, envy comes to be aspecific problem. According to Girard’s theory, envy and other “modernemotions” spread with the decreasing distance between subject andmediator. Here I would like to add a further consideration.

As we were seeing, Christian societies had a quite efficient thoughfragile way to maintain balance, at least as far as our problem is concerned,thanks to the doctrine of the seven deadly sins, avoiding any showing off onthe part of the endogenous fixed points projected upward by mimeticconvergences and teaching everybody to avoid and to stave off envy (and ofcourse taking care of the insulted and the injured, formerly perceived asmonsters or beasts). What we may remark is that envy no longer functions asa negative feedback. Those who might still show off won’t have to fear anyenvious aggression; nevertheless, they would easily encounter ecclesiasticand therefore social disapproval.53 Again, this does not have much to do



with the distinction between internal and external mediation; it has to dowith the definition and constitution of the transcendental social space (thatis to say, the region of possibilities of the social and human condition). Insuch a society the definition of the community’s borders has no (or poor)systemic constraints; the limits of the projection are to be determined bythe point’s own humility. On the other hand, the beast and the monster arenot victimized anymore, the tails of the curve do not get lopped offanymore.

Before going on, I would like to recall some of Dupuy’s references,especially on G. M. Foster and Thorstein Veblen.54 Foster, who was writingshortly after Shoeck,55 described traditional means of coping with envy,both inward and outward; in other words, the ways people in traditionalsocieties deal with their own envy toward others and with the fear of others’envy. He shows how many of our cultural institutions, ritualized behaviors,and social interactions actually serve to hide and at the same time todischarge envy. The most important consideration, for our hypothesis, isthat, according to Foster, the cultural forms he has analyzed “have beendeveloped to aid man in coping with psychological problems”56 derivedfrom envy. One of them, the one we are most interested in, is a variation onthe theme of the sins of pride or vainglory: it is not just about not showingoff, but the actual terror of emerging over one’s peers.57 The principalmodality being the simple—and yet hard to realize—hiding of all potentialobjects of envy.

Veblen describes a completely different situation, that of a leisure classdedicated to showing off through what he calls conspicuous consumption—abehavior that is quite the opposite of that described by Foster. Veblenprovides a very precious sociological account of the progressive inversion inbehaviors related to social status and envy, describing a situation that, fromour perspective, could be considered as representative of an intermediaryphase. We could say that the self-regulating system of envy is broken, butsomething more profound and significant is going on here, something thathas to do with mass-media society.

POSITIVE FEEDBACK

We will start from a simple consideration of the incredible power of displayprovided by the internet and mass-media:

it’s the risk we are running with the facile and much easier internet literacy prêt-a-porter, in which the electronic plaza and the chance to surf are virtually available for



everybody and equal opportunity ismore safeguarded than substantial inequalities;the internet can then be a harbinger of new forms of envy, produced by superficialcomparison with the rest of the world.58

This problem is just a specific occurrence of the argument we are trying todefine here. The very same idea of displaying, of showing off, is in itselfsomething that has to do with the evolution we are tracing. Let us take themedia environment. We were referring to Foster’s analysis of the traditionalmodalities for coping with envy, the first being concealment: hiding as a wayto avoid the risk of being the object of other people’s envy, a terrifying thing.De Nardis, along the same lines, is proposing an account of showing off as asort of modern struggle for recognition, considering other people’s envy assomething that gives self-assurance and confidence.

Thanks to Latin epigraphy, we know that already in Ancient Rome itwas common to “overestimate oneself to be overestimated”; nevertheless,we need to underline that we are witnessing a significant shift in the set ofconsequences of these behaviors. As we were just saying, where showing off,just like overestimation, could eventually be interpreted as rational conductwith potential harmful side effects, like spreading envy and risking socialconsequences, then the very core structure of the media society isconstituted by a radical inversion of the feedback system.

A few examples will illustrate the problem: advertising and commercialsare conceived precisely on the idea of spreading envy, we would even say ofspreading a truly violent metaphysical desire. We would see in the perfumecommercials the most explicit use of mimetic insights. Having almostnothing to describe as better or more useful or more efficient, having to sellsomething that is quite metaphysical itself, advertisers cannot do anythingbut arouse, sometimes even instigate, a metaphysical desire for the model’sbeing. He or she is just beautiful, charming, sexy, and advertising isattributing these features to the effect of the perfume, something that theperfume itself could bestow on anyone. This may be a good definition ofmimetic desire in Girard’s writing. One can imagine the consumer saying tohimself: “If I only had that perfume maybe I could gain the completenessdisplayed by my model.” Advertising is deliberately and willfully spreadingmimetic desires in the audience, to make it envious of something that couldeasily be bought. We see then that showing off, through envy, is directly andimmediately productive. The arrow of the feedback is now completely inverted.Spreading envy is no longer risky,59 rising over one’s peers is not dangerousanymore, nor is it just a potential side effect of a spontaneous—or



apparently spontaneous—behavior, but it has become a sound and explicitstrategy to obtain solid advantages and benefits. We would like to giveanother example.

We have been discussing Dupuy’s analysis of the crowd’s projection asthe process for creating endogenous fixed points; if we can apply it topolitics leaders or divine figures, we can clearly apply it to our era’s stars,VIPs, and so forth.

Let us make a detour to introduce a theme that will shed light on our topicin a suggestive way. We must then briefly introduce some considerations fromthe newly reframed field of the philosophy of information, especially frominformation ethics.Wewill lean on thework of Luciano Floridi, a leading authoron the question. Because our intention is quite lateral to the main arguments ofthis approach, wewill just refer to themost common use of the term informationto take into account Floridi’s hypothesis for an ontological interpretation ofinformational privacy. We know that privacy is usually considered in analogywith property; therefore, information privacy is just to be respected for the sakeof the individual right to personal security and property. In this perspective, aviolation of privacy is equated with a housebreaking. According to Floridi,60 thequestion of privacy is to be radically reinterpreted, taking account of theessential informational nature of human beings and of the operations theyperform as social informational agents. This reinterpretation is accomplishedconsidering every person as constituted by his own information; in this way, wecan conceive violation of informational privacy as simply an aggression againstpersonal identity.61

Ontological interpretation suggests that there is no difference between one’s infor-mational sphere andone’s personal identity. “You are your information, ” so anythingdone to your information is done to you, not to your belongings.62

Floridi is telling us that defending one’s privacy is just like saving one’s ownintegrity and unicity of informational being. An agent, an individual, is hisown information; in this case, “my” as an adjective referred to informationdoes not have the same meaning that it has in an expression like “my car”but that it has in “my arm.” It’s about a sense of constitutive belonging andnot just of external property, a sense for which my body, my feelings, myinformation are me more than they are my possessions.63

Now that we have clear in mind this ontological interpretation of theconcepts of privacy and information, we can understand in a new way what ourmedia society is about most of the time. Once the pagan self-regulatinghomeostability and Christian balanced structure of sins and virtues are lost, we



find ourselves in a society that keeps on working with periodical projection ofendogenous fixed points through mimetic convergences: many have discussedthe analogy between ancient gods and modern stars (that interestingly enoughin Italian are called divi) and thanks to Girard we can see that the creatingprocess is the very same.What wemight like to add is that the sine wave processkeeps going on; informational ethics provides us a way to understand gossipingas a virtual sparagmos. To make our hypothesis clearer, let us look at a veryspecific category of stars: sports champions. They clearly enjoy the product ofworldwide mimetic convergences that lifted the salary and fame of thesetalented men to the ridiculously over-sized and hypertrophic condition of ourtimes. They are the explicit object of metaphysical desire that manifests itselfthrough a particularly contagious and fascinating phenomenon. As the gossip ofwhich they are the object is likely to be envisaged as a virtual sparagmos,64 anattempt to personal identities, a very much concrete grasping of being, themerchandising of sports stars is just another manifestation of the desire for theirbeing. The kids who wear the shirt of Cristiano Ronaldo, or Wayne Rooney, orKobe Bryant, or whomever else, pretend to be and to a certain point feel likethey are their idols. What is changing, in our opinion, as we were suggestingbefore, is that the self-regulating system of envy, through wave process ofprojection and tearing apart of the idol through the negative feedback of envy,does not work anymore. Stars, idols, and champions do not just enjoy mimeticconvergence projections but can actually keep on rising thanks to a socialstructure that rewards showing off. Themore they get to be seen, themore theywill be the object of fascination and of virtual grasping of their being, throughgossip,magazines, ormerchandising. The difference is that provoking envy is nolonger a negative feedback, it has actually turned into a positive feedback thatdoes not re-establish any balance nor release any tension, but, on the contrary,keeps on propagating disillusion and cognitive dissonances.

We can now see that in a Christian society, inhibiting the victimageresolution actually takes into account just one side of the coin. Therevelation, or at least Girard’s narrow account of it, prevents only the violentoccurrence of the logic of the endogenous fixed point but does not take careanymore of the definition and delimitation of the social space, oncemechanically determined.

The projection of endogenous fixed points vaingloriously enjoyingthe effects of mimetic convergences expands the limits of the socialspace, creating unreasonable models of achievement put on display. Atthe same time, both the bonds of solidarity65 and the welfare state, avestige of Christian caring institutions, are fading away, leaving the last



ones falling lower and lower in comparison to their peers; as a matter offact, the structure of differences granting those thresholds that couldhave served to create external mediations are fading away themselves. Itis not just about social differences but also any other difference perceivedas transcendent that is fading away. The last transcendent ideologicalcriterion to create external mediations and limit painful and enviouscomparisons, merit, is collapsing too.

The same goes for other avatars of transcendent differences, such astalent. Let us take a narrative example: “He’d lost his magic. Theimpulse was spent. He’d never failed in the theater, everything he haddone had been strong and successful, and the terrible thing happened:he couldn’t act. Going on-stage became agony. Instead of the certaintythat he was going to be wonderful, he knew he was going to fail. Ithappened three times in a row, and by the last time nobody wasinterested, nobody came. He couldn’t get over to the audience. Histalent was dead.”66 In this scene, even though we could be misled, we cansee, in the dramatic verso, the interdependence of the author’s talent andhis audience. Also, there is no talent whose relevance is not declared anddetermined through mimetic convergence.67 No talent, no merit cantherefore reduce the envious comparison between people that are justcaught in the spiral and find themselves either at the top being envied orat the bottom, envying.

The scenario we have been describing is getting more and morecritical; because of the mimetic convergences on endogenous fixedpoints are projected higher and higher, the outer borders of theconstitution of the transcendental social space are expanding wider andwider and at the same time any sort of transcendent difference inbetween the borders, containing mimetic desires, is collapsing.68

We would not welcome back ostracism or scapegoating. Nevertheless,because of “resentment, envy, jealousy, and destroying hate, evil can acquire aconsiderable power,”69 it is time to take care of the people who are caught inbetween: on one side the divine and heroic, on the other the bestial andmonstrous.

NOTES

1. René Girard,Oedipus Unbound: Selected Writings on Rivalry and Desire, ed. M. R. Anspach(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 70.



2. Girard makes reference to Vernant’s essay in Violence and the Sacred, trans. PatrickGregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 93.

3. Jean-Pierre Vernant, “Ambiguïté et renversement. Sur la structure énigmatique d’Œdipe-Roi,” Echanges et communications. Mélanges offerts a Claude Lévi-Strauss (Paris: Mouton,1970) t. II, 1253–1279, English translation, “Ambiguity and Reversal. On the EnigmaticStructure of Oedipus Rex,”New Literary History 9 (1978): 475–50.

4. René Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure, trans.Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966).

5. Girard,Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, 12.

6. Girard,Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, 14.

7. We are referring to victimage phenomena like that conceived by Patrick Süskind in his1985 best-seller Das Parfum—Die Geschichte eines Mörders, which was then powerfullystaged by Tom Tykwer in his 2006 Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, when at the veryend, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille is literally torn apart by the peasants in the market square.

8. Paul Dumouchel and Jean-Pierre Dupuy, L’enfer des choses. René Girard et la logique del’économie (Paris: Seuil, 1979).

9. Jean-Pierre Dupuy, Libéralisme et justice sociale. Le sacrifice et l’envie (Paris: Hachette,2009).

10. Dumouchel and Dupuy, L’enfer des choses, 28. (My translation here and throughoutunless otherwise indicated).

11. George M. Foster, “The Anatomy of Envy: A Study in Symbolic Behavior,” CurrentAnthropology 13, no. 2 (1972): 168.

12. Dumouchel and Dupuy, L’enfer des choses, 41–42.

13. Jean-Pierre Dupuy, Dans l’œil du cyclone. Colloque de Cerisy, ed. M. R. Anspach (Paris:Carnets Nord, 2008).

14. Jean-Pierre Dupuy, La marque du sacré (Paris: Carnets Nord, 2008).

15. Dupuy,Dans l’œil du cyclone, 305.

16. See also Girard’s remarks on the “coquette effect” in René Girard, Things Hidden since theFoundation of the World, trans. Stephen Bann and Michael Metteer (Stanford, CA:Stanford University Press, 1987), 370.

17. Just think about the Roman Empire: after its foundation, every following leader kept onbeing called Caesar, up to the Russian Emperors, called Tsar as a transliterated crasis ofCaesar.

18. Girard set out very early to develop the intuition of Oedipus’s innocence. Oedipus is,according to Girard, a scapegoat of Thebes and can be considered as both the originalpharmakos, the one victim beyond the Greek ritual or one of the ritual victims.

19. William B. Stanford, Ambiguity in Greek Literature (Oxford: 1939), 163–173.

20. Vernant, “Ambiguity and Reversal,” 492, original French version, 1276.

21. Cf. already Aristotle, Politics, III, IX, 1283 and following:



If, however, there be someoneperson, ormore thanone, althoughnot enough tomakeup the full complement of a state, whose virtue is so pre-eminent that the virtues or thepolitical capacity of all the rest admit of no comparisonwith his or theirs, he or they canbeno longer regardedaspartof a state; for justicewill notbedone to the superior, if he isreckonedonlyas theequalof thosewhoare so far inferior tohiminvirtueand inpoliticalcapacity. Such an one may truly be deemed a God among men. Hence we see thatlegislation is necessarily concerned onlywith thosewho are equal in birth and in capac-ity; and that for men of pre-eminent virtue there is no law—they are themselves a law.Any would be ridiculous who attempted to make laws for them: they would probablyretortwhat, in the fable ofAntisthenes, the lions said to thehares,when in the council ofthe beasts the latter began haranguing and claiming equality for all. And for this reasondemocratic states have instituted ostracism; equality is above all things their aim, andtherefore they ostracized and banished from the city for a time those who seemed topredominate toomuch through their wealth, or the number of their friends, or throughany other political influence.

22. Vernant, “Ambiguity and Reversal,” 477–78, original French version, 1256–57.

23. Vernant appears to have just observed a phenomenon that he does not reallyunderstand. The play of doubles, the undifferentiation crisis, the opposition of twotruths, in Girard’s paradigm assume a much more precise and organic sense; at leastjudging by these passages, Vernant and Stanford are attributing to Sophocles anextraordinary expertise in weaving his plot. He manages to pass on all thefundamental messages, the sacred’s enantiosemy, the divine’s echo as a sinister burstof laughter, the gradual mélange of the two logoi, Oedipus being a double, caught inthe dialectic. We would say that Vernant does not understand what Oedipus hasgone through because he is mythologically convinced of Oedipus’s guilt. What isreally striking is that he is speaking about truth just as if the one truth he isattributing to the gods was the one hidden behind Oedipus’s words and not theother way around. Even when attributing to the gods a double and ambiguouslanguage, that hides and reveals at the same time, he does not suspect that truthcould be the scapegoating and the perverse Umwendung the trial. The same attitudetoward the mythical guilt of Oedipus can be found in Jean-Pierre Vernant, “GreekTragedy: Problems of interpretation,” The Structuralist Controversy. The Languages ofCriticism and the Sciences of Man, ed. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato(Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970), 273–95, cf. 293–94.

24. Bernard Knox, Oedipus at Thebes. Sophocles’s Tragic Hero and His Time (New Haven,CT: Yale University Press, 1957).

25. Vernant, “Ambiguity and Reversal,” 482, original French version, 1262 [myemphasis].






29. Vernant, “Ambiguity and Reversal,” 499 n. 49, original French version, 1269.

30. Vernant, “Ambiguity and Reversal,” 490, original French version, 1273 (see J. Carcopino,L’ostracisme athénien, 1935; A. Galderini, L’Ostracisme, 1945). Vernant acknowledges thecontribution of Louis Gernet as far as the combination of the institution of ostracism andthe rite of the pharmakos is concerned.

31. Let us see what Vernant tells us about it:

Ostracism aims as a rule at getting rid of that citizen who, raised too high, threatensto accede to the tyranny. But, in this completely positive form, the explanationcannot take account of certain of the institution’s archaic features. It functions everyyear, doubtless between the sixth and the eight prytaneion, following rules contraryto the ordinary procedures of political and legal life. Ostracism is a judgment thataims at “ridding the city” of a citizen by a temporary exile of ten years, . . . Everythingis organized to give to the popular feeling which the Greeks name phtonos (bothenvy and religious mistrust in regard to one who rises too high, succeeds too well)the occasion to manifest itself in the most spontaneous and unanimous form (itrequires at least six thousand voters), outside all rule of law, all rational justification.For what is the ostracized reproached but for those same superiorities which raisehim above the common and for his fortune, too great, which threatens to attractdivine prosecution to the city. The fear of tyranny is mixed with a deeper apprehen-sion, of a religious kind, in regard to someone who puts the whole group in danger.As Solon writes: “A city perishes by its overly great men.”

Vernant, “Ambiguity and Reversal,” 490–91, original French version, 1273–74.


33. Let us add a consideration: it appears that, consciously or not, the Greeks, whateverNietzsche thought of them, were very much aware of the fact the individual’s credit is notso much individual. Ostracizing the most distinct individual is obscure and irrational onlyif you think that he has the merit for his condition. If you believe that he does not deservethe credit and if you can observe that his anomalous rising will cause envy and (mimetic)disorder to burst out we would say that it is wise and very rational—though very muchpitiless—to expel him.


35. This very same production of exogeneity is to our account what the Christian Revelationis partly unveiling, aside from the victimage process itself.


37. In many ways we are here taking into account Hans Weigand’s paper: “ComplexMimetic Systems,” Contagion: Journal of Violence, Mimesis, and Culture, 15/16 (2008–2009): 61–112.

38. This goes along with the thesis formulated by Pierre Clastres in his Society Against theState: Essays in Political Anthropology (New York: Zone Books, 1987). This self-regulating



homeostasis guaranteed by envy as a negative feedback may easily lie behind theaversions of communities to the chief’s power described by the French anthropologist.Nonetheless, misunderstanding the constitutive role of memory, Clastres fails to identifythe process of constitution of complex social structures (institutional morphogenesis)engendered by the composition of mimetic mechanisms and mnestic traces.

39. Let us also envisage that, as it has been said by Bruno Manghi, envy usually getsstronger and stronger “when it points to one or a few precise and known people,” seePaolo De Nardis, L’invidia. Un rompicapo per le scienze sociali (Roma: Meltemi,2001), 43 (my translation). We should keep in mind Girard’s analysis of thespreading of envy and mimetic desire as a responsibility, a form of sadism—ofValentine in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, or Collatine in “The Rape of Lucrece”—not to be forgot, cf. René Girard, A Theatre of Envy. William Shakespeare (New York:Oxford University Press, 1991), 8–29, 44 et passim.

40. “In the person of the ostracized, the city expels what in it is too elevated, what incarnatesthe evil which can come to it from above. In the evil of the pharmakos, it expels what isvilest in itself, what incarnates the evil that menaces it from below. By this double andcomplementary rejection it delimits itself in relation to what is not yet known and whattranscends the known: it takes the proper measure of the human in opposition on oneside to the divine and heroic, on the other to the bestial and monstrous.” Vernant,“Ambiguity and Reversal,” 491–92, original French version, 1274–75.

41. See for different accounts of the role of memory and writing in the constitution of socialreality and in the individuation process, Maurizio Ferraris, Documentalita. Perché ènecessario lasciar tracce (Roma-Bari, Italy: Laterza, 2011) and Bernard Stiegler, Latechnique et le temps, vol. 3, (Paris: Galilée, 1994–1998).

42. See Emanuele Antonelli, La creativita degli eventi. René Girard e Jacques Derrida (Torino,Italy: L’Harmattan Italia, 2011).

43. See René Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books,2001), 7–13.

44. Aristotle,Nicomachean Ethics, II.7.1108b.1–10.

45. Evaristo Pontico, Gli Otto Spiriti Malvagi, trans. F. Comello (Parma: Pratiche Editrice,1990), 11–12; he listed: gluttony, lust, greed, despair, wrath, acedia, vainglory and pride.See also E. Pulcini, Invidia. La passione triste (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2011).

46. He made some more changes, folding despair into sloth, adding extravagance whileremoving fornication.

47. I will not add any specific consideration on the obvious application of Girard’s andDupuy’s insight on narcissism.

48. Orgueil: “ce qui donne le sentiment de ne rien devoir a personne.” We can also think ofthe parable of the Pharisee and the Publican, Luke 18:9–14.

49. Probably from O. French prud, oblique case of adjective prouz, “brave, valiant” (eleventhcentury).



50. See “Online Etymology Dictionary,” http://www.etymonline.com/ (accessed February 26,2013).

51. See “Dizionario Etimologico,” http://www.etimo.it (accessed February 26, 2013).

52. Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness (New York: H. Liverwright, 1930).

53. See G. Todeschini, Visibilmente crudeli. Malviventi, persone sospette e gente qualunque dalMedioevo all’eta moderna (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2007).

54. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions(London: Macmillan & Company, 1899).

55. Helmut Schoeck, Envy: A Theory of Social Behavior (New York: Harcourt, Brace &World, Inc., 1969).

56. Foster, Anatomy of Envy, see the abstract above.

57. We will not enter into other details of these behaviors, for which we refer to Fosterhimself and, above all, to the absolutely outstanding work of Dupuy, Libéralisme et justicesociale.

58. De Nardis, L’invidia, 106.

59. See Girard, Shakespeare, 4.

60. See Luciano Floridi, “The Ontological Interpretation of Informational Privacy,” Ethicsand Information Technology 7, no. 4 (2005): 185–200, 208.

61. Floridi, The Ontological Interpretation of Informational Privacy, 196.

62. Floridi, The Ontological Interpretation of Informational Privacy, 196. (My emphasis.)

63. See Floridi, The Ontological Interpretation of Informational Privacy, 196.

64. For a different and very suggestive account on the same problem, see Sergio Manghi,Zidane. Anatomia di una testata mondiale. Testo per voce recitante (Troina: Citta ApertaEdizioni, 2007).

65. On this see Paul Dumouchel, Le sacrifice inutile. Essai de philosophie politique,Flammarion, 2011. The English translation will be published by Michigan StateUniversity Press in 2014.

66. Philip Roth, The Humbling (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009), 1. (Myemphasis.)

67. Once again, one could be misled and think that scarcity of talents is prior to mimeticconvergence. For a general dismissal of this objection see Paul Dumouchel,L’ambivalence de la rareté, in Dumouchel and Dupuy, L’enfer des choses.

68. We may add, just in a footnote, that the very same mimetic nature of human desiremakes harder—even more than we may have been used to think in a romanticparadigm—to live in such a transcendental social space, where virtually everything canbe desired but hardly anything can be achieved. It is of course not at all serendipitousthat one could read such a sentence in Alexis de Tocqueville: “Elle [cette même égalité]limite de tous côtés leurs [des citoyens] forces, en même temps qu’elle permet a leursdésirs de s’étendre,” Alexis de Tocqueville, La démocratie en Amérique, vol. 2 (Paris: Ed.



http://www.etymonline.com/

http://www.etimo.it

R. Laffont, 1986) § 2, chapter 13, 522: “The same equality which allows every citizen toconceive these lofty hopes, renders all the citizens less able to realize them: itcircumscribes their powers on every side, whilst it gives freer scope to their desires.”

69. Jean-Pierre Dupuy, Avions-nous oublié le mal? Penser la politique après le 11 Septembre(Bayard: Paris, 2002), 31.



E. Antonelli - The Child of Fortune. Envy and the Constitution of the Social Space, seconde bozze

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